ABSTRACT
Indicators of delinking or decoupling, that is, improvements of environmental/ resource indicators with respect to economic indicators, are increasingly used to evaluate progress in the use of natural and environmental resources. Delinking trends for industrial materials and energy in advanced countries have been under scrutiny for decades. In the 1990s, research on delinking was extended to air pollutants and greenhouse gases (GHGs, henceforth) emissions. ‘Stylised facts’ were proposed on the relationship between pollution and economic growth that came to be known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC, henceforth), which was based on general reasoning around relative or absolute delinking in incomeenvironment dynamics relationships.
